Pages tagged "Elections worldwide"

The Turkish election in June 2015 was remarkable for many reasons. In this short piece, FairVote's Robert Buderi explores the ins and outs of the 2015 campaign and the operation of Turkey's party list proportional system. Buderi shows that a high national threshold in a proportional representation system tends to undermine the proportionality of election results and introduce some of the problems rife in winner-take-all plurality systems like the US and Britain.

Brazilians flocked to the polls on October 5, 2014, to vote for their next president. Yet, after all the votes were counted, no one was elected. This blog entry briefly explores the use of runoff elections in Brazil before discussing the growing worldwide movement to repeat Brazil's enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds.

At the end of an unusual election campaign, New Zealand's Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) electoral system has delivered Kiwis a strong mandate for the current government, with the first time a single party has won a majority of seats since the nation replaced U.S.-style plurality voting elections with MMP in 1993. The election also demonstrated many of the advantages that such fair representation voting systems have over the single-member plurality systems so often used in American elections.

In India's election of the 16th Lok Sabha, the BJP appeared to win a landslide victory, winning a majority of seats. In reality, India's winner-take-all system generated significant disproportionality, artificially inflating BJP's mandate.

South Africa's fifth general election since the end of the apartheid era brought another victory for the ruling ANC, but their support has been wavering. The proportional representation system, originally advocated by Mandela, has brought proportional outcomes to South African elections.

Tasmanian House of Assembly elections have been decided using ranked choice voting in multi-member districts for over 100 years. This year's contest once again demonstrated the value of such systems for ensuring fair representation for voters of all stripes, even as a significant shift in power occurred.

Egyptian voters approved a new constitution last week, and Tunisia's National Constituent Assembly is on the verge of passing a new constitution as well. What does that mean for elections in the two fledgling democracies?